Search results matching tags 'SQL Server 2008 R2' and 'PASS'http://sqlblog.com/search/SearchResults.aspx?o=DateDescending&tag=SQL+Server+2008+R2,PASS&orTags=0Search results matching tags 'SQL Server 2008 R2' and 'PASS'en-USCommunityServer 2.1 SP2 (Build: 61129.1)Blogging from the PASS Keynote : 2009-11-05http://sqlblog.com/blogs/aaron_bertrand/archive/2009/11/05/blogging-from-the-pass-keynote-2009-11-05.aspxThu, 05 Nov 2009 17:24:00 GMT21093a07-8b3d-42db-8cbf-3350fcbf5496:18568AaronBertrand<p>Bill Graziano took the stage and promised us the shortest keynote yet.&nbsp; He started by giving thanks to outgoing board members Greg Low, Pat Wright and Kevin Kline.&nbsp; Wayne Snyder took over and gave an emotional homage to Kevin, who gave 10 solid years to PASS.&nbsp; Very touching.&nbsp; Kevin left the stage to a standing ovation.</p><p>Introduced Brian Moran, Jeremiah Peschka and Thomas LaRock as the new Directors-at-Large, and Rushabh Mehta as the new President.&nbsp; Reaffirmed commitment to the community, and announced the PASS European Conference in Neuss, Germany, April 21-23, 2010.&nbsp; The North American summit is already scheduled for November 8-11, 2010, again in Seattle.&nbsp; (And if you <a href="http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/na2010" title="http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/na2010" target="_blank">register early enough</a>, you can get in for $995.)&nbsp; A lot of people who live in different time zones have expressed the desire to move the conference around, but I agree with Bill; having the conference this close to Microsoft provides enough benefit to offset the impact on travel.&nbsp; That's my opinion, of course. <br></p><p><br><b>Patrick Ortiz, Infrastructure Consulting Services, Dell</b> </p><p>Patrick came on and talked about the structure of Dell's operations involving Microsoft architecture (Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, etc.).&nbsp; Then he jumped into how they approach the combination of consolidation, disaster recovery, and configuration management.&nbsp; Apologies to Patrick, but there wasn't really anything exciting about his presentation; it seemed more that it should have been an elective session as opposed to a keynote for everyone in attendance.&nbsp; But I guess you get this privilege when you are such a big supporting vendor, and I do hope we collectively appreciate that.&nbsp; Okay, about halfway through, he did have one funny line about typical disaster recovery behavior, which seemed to wake up about 10% of the audience.&nbsp; But this didn't redeem the segment; sorry.<br></p><p><br><b>David DeWitt, Data and Storage Platform Division, Microsoft</b></p><p>David came on and made some funny comments about past incidents on stage, including the 192-core server that seemed like it was going to catch on fire when the fans kicked in.&nbsp; David runs the Jim Gray Systems Lab in Madison, WI.&nbsp; He is working on SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (or, as David would like to name it, SQL*).&nbsp; He promises to overwhelm us with technical details as opposed to making a marketing-ish presentation.</p><p>He compared how things have changed since 1980, including a 1,000X improvement in CPU cache, memory capacity, and CPU performance, and 10,000X increase in storage capacity.&nbsp; Whereas transfer times have only improved 65X, and seek times have only improved 10X.&nbsp; Seems funny that we are worried about getting 32-, 64-, 192-core machines when the disk performance simply can't scale to keep those CPUs busy.&nbsp; In fact when he measures transfer bandwidth per byte of storage, drives are actually 150X slower today compared to 1980, in relative terms.&nbsp; In 1980, the ratio of perf from Sequential : Random is 5 : 1.&nbsp; Today, it is 33 : 1.&nbsp; Meaning we have to focus on sequential reads and move the disk heads as little as possible.&nbsp; He also explained that as much as 50% of the time, the CPUs is sitting there, waiting for the memory to deliver something into its L2 caches.</p><p>David's idea about improving the storage bottleneck problem is to use column-wise storage instead of row-wise.&nbsp; Essentially, imagine storing all the values for each column, instead of each row, on common pages. The example showed how you could store ~2,000 values for a BalanceDue column (INT) on a single page, as opposed to the page being crowded by the other columns, and therefore being able to store far fewer rows on each page.&nbsp; (You still have to worry about the I/O for the other column values you want to retrieve; however a subset of columns will be faster in this model. SELECT * will never be faster, of course.&nbsp; But we usually don't want SELECT *, right?)&nbsp; This is a really interesting concept, and at its core it is quite simple, but implementation in existing architectures is far from trivial.</p><p>Since disk capacities have gotten 10,000X better, you can store redundant copies using different sort orders.&nbsp; Especially because with columnar storage, you can compress very well, leading to great reductions in storage requirements - leaving plenty of free space that will otherwise go to waste.&nbsp; By using run length encoding compression - in a certain sort order, you only need to store the offsets of contiguous rows that .&nbsp; Bit-vector encoding and dictionary encoding can be combined with run length encoding to achieve really fantastic compression rates; David's research yields improvements from 3X to 10X over row store.</p><p>Compression makes a lot of sense in this case because (remember) CPU is
1,000X faster than it used to be, and disk is only 65X.&nbsp; So any time we
can trade CPU cycles in exchange for less I/O, we should do it.&nbsp;
Basically we are striving to move the majority of the work to thecomponent(s) of the system that have improved the most over time (and continue to do so). </p><p>He explained the difference between early materialization and late materialization (where materialization is the process of turning the columns into rows) - queries with joins should use early materialization because they need to process against the whole table; queries without joins can use later materialization which again pushes the materialization work to CPU.<br></p><p>Updates are the big problem here... you have these very tightly packed columns, so you store deltas (which the queries must observe) and occasionally rebuild.&nbsp; Not suitable for OLTP or cases where reads occur against more than half of the columns of a table.</p><p>Microsoft is shipping VertiPaq, an in-memory column store, in SQL Server 2008 R2.&nbsp; So the hint is that there is definitely some work in this area underway for SQL11.<br></p><p>My mind is starting to hurt, but there are some very cool ideas here.<br></p><p>Note that throughout David's time on stage, Twitter was still abuzz with complaining about the Dell portion of the keynote.&nbsp; My favorite was from Steve Jones: <span class="status-body"><span class="entry-content">"<a href="http://twitter.com/way0utwest/status/5454983312" title="http://twitter.com/way0utwest/status/5454983312" target="_blank">@BrentO</a><a href="http://twitter.com/way0utwest/status/5454983312" title="http://twitter.com/way0utwest/status/5454983312" target="_blank"></a><a href="http://twitter.com/way0utwest/status/5454983312" title="http://twitter.com/way0utwest/status/5454983312" target="_blank"> Somebody tell the Dell guy PASS is in Orlando next year.</a>"</span></span></p><p>Wayne came on stage and announced that the keynote will be available on the DVDs.&nbsp; Just one more reason the $125 will be worth every penny. <br></p>Blogging from the PASS Keynote : 2009-11-04http://sqlblog.com/blogs/aaron_bertrand/archive/2009/11/04/blogging-from-the-pass-keynote-2009-11-04.aspxWed, 04 Nov 2009 16:31:00 GMT21093a07-8b3d-42db-8cbf-3350fcbf5496:18534AaronBertrand<p><b>Rushabh Mehta, PASS President of Finance<br></b></p><p>What makes PASS run?&nbsp; He mentioned CA and Microsoft as founding members.&nbsp; But the overwhelming response from the crowd: we're more interested in free drinks.</p><p>Stressed financial transparency ... members can log in and then go to <a href="http://www.sqlpass.org/governance" title="http://www.sqlpass.org/governance" target="_blank">http://www.sqlpass.org/governance</a> to review budgets, revenue and expenses going back to 2003, and board minutes. <br></p><p>For the coming year, they are increasing expenditures in the community, even though overall revenues are down 15%.</p><p>Encouraged people to engage with PASS:</p><ul><li>sign up for free membership on the site.&nbsp; Free recordings of PASS summit sessions </li><li>find a local chapter or regional chapter <br></li><li>local events </li><li>network with members <br></li><li>become a speaker</li><li>become a volunteer or community leader<br><br></li></ul><p><b>PASSion awards</b></p><p>Wayne Snyder came on stage and recognized outstanding volunteers Tim Ford (<a href="http://twitter.com/sqlagentman" title="http://twitter.com/sqlagentman" target="_blank">@sqlagentman</a>), Grant Fritchey (<a href="http://twitter.com/GFritchey" title="http://twitter.com/GFritchey" target="_blank">@GFritchey</a>), Amy Lewis, and Jacob Sebastian (<a href="http://twitter.com/jacobsebastian" title="http://twitter.com/jacobsebastian" target="_blank">@jacobsebastian</a>).&nbsp; The PASSion award was split into international and North America.&nbsp; The international award went to Charley Hanania, leader of the Swiss PASS chapter, who managed the 2009 PASS European conference.&nbsp; The North American award went to Allen Kinsel (<a href="http://twitter.com/sqlinsaneo" title="http://twitter.com/sqlinsaneo" target="_blank">@sqlinsaneo</a>), the Program Manager for the 2009 Program Committee.&nbsp; The official press release is here: <a href="http://www.sqlpass.org/AboutPASS/News/news13.aspx" title="http://www.sqlpass.org/AboutPASS/News/news13.aspx" target="_blank">http://www.sqlpass.org/AboutPASS/News/news13.aspx</a><br></p><p><br><b>Tom Casey, General Manager, SQL Server BI, Microsoft<br></b></p><p>Tom (<a href="http://www.twitter.com/ms_sql_server" title="http://www.twitter.com/ms_sql_server" target="_blank">@ms_sql_server</a>) came on talked about the theory that less than 20% of decision makers have access to the information they need.&nbsp; The BI platform is aiming at improving that ratio by providing a better platform and more useful tools to ease administration and enable end users.&nbsp; Ron VanZanten (dressed like Tom's evil twin) from Premier Bank Card came on stage and talked about his data (25 TB) and the challenges of having 3,200+ employees use that information in a productive way.&nbsp; They decided on SQL Server BI stack for flexibility, control, and acceptance/familiarity among employees; performance and price played a major part as well.&nbsp; He made a little fun of cobbled solutions using Excel and Access, and how managed self-service BI will stop these things from cropping up in our organizations.</p><p>Amir Netz (<a href="http://twitter.com/amirnetz" title="http://twitter.com/amirnetz" target="_blank">@amirnetz</a>) came on stage again to demonstrate end user value of PowerPivot.&nbsp; This was essentially the same as the demo from yesterday, but with a little more detail and a little more humor.&nbsp; Once again the theme is that the end user will have much more power to consume and derive insight from back-end data using updated versions of tools they are already familiar with (Office &amp; SharePoint).&nbsp; There wasn't much mention of the distinction between what you can do with the high-end editions of SQL Server and SharePoint, and what you can do with more commodity editions.&nbsp; My feeling is that some of these bells and whistles are further separators between the edition most of us can afford (Standard) and the editions most of us want (until 2008, Enterprise, and in 2008 R2, Enterprise and DataCenter).<br></p>Blogging from the PASS Keynote : 2009-11-03http://sqlblog.com/blogs/aaron_bertrand/archive/2009/11/03/blogging-from-the-pass-keynote-2009-11-03.aspxTue, 03 Nov 2009 15:53:00 GMT21093a07-8b3d-42db-8cbf-3350fcbf5496:18502AaronBertrand<p><b>Highlights</b></p><p>We were told that there is going to be a November CTP of SQL Server 2008 R2.&nbsp; There are two new editions planned for the RTM release:
DataCenter Edition (256 logical processors, unlimited virtualization)
and Parallel Data Warehouse Edition (formerly known as "Madison").&nbsp;
There was a great demo of a 64 CPU system scaling up to 128 and then 192 to handle additional
load. They didn't talk about pricing, but <a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=4410&amp;tag=col1;post-4410" title="http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=4410&amp;tag=col1;post-4410" target="_blank">outside sources suggest that edition pricing (not CALs) is going up</a>.&nbsp; For more details from the source, see the <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/nov09/11-03pass09pr.mspx" title="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/nov09/11-03pass09pr.mspx" target="_blank">official press release</a>.<br></p><p>SQL Server has new benchmark records: TPC-E: 2,012 tpsE - best
speed on x64 &amp; IA64 at lowest price.&nbsp; TPC-H 3TB: 102,778 QphH -
world-record on Windows. Dynamix CRM: 20K users with sub-second
response time.&nbsp; Impressive speed that many of us will never be able to
(or need to achieve), but there is a subtler realization from this
announcement: TPC results must be issued six months within the release
of the product.&nbsp; This means SQL Server 2008 R2 will RTM by the
beginning of May!&nbsp; <br></p><p><b>Wayne Snyder, President, PASS</b><br></p><p>The keynote opened with Life is a Highway by <a href="http://www.tomcochrane.com/" title="http://www.tomcochrane.com/" target="_blank">Tom Cochrane</a> (a Canadian!).&nbsp; Wayne has always reminded me a little of <a href="http://kennyrogers.musiccitynetworks.com/" title="http://kennyrogers.musiccitynetworks.com/" target="_blank">Kenny Rogers</a> (not a Canadian).&nbsp; He talked about the value of community, with the highlight: <b>connect, share, learn</b>.&nbsp; This year's version of the <a href="http://summit2009.sqlpass.org/AboutSummit/ROI/tabid/63/Default.aspx" title="http://summit2009.sqlpass.org/AboutSummit/ROI/tabid/63/Default.aspx" target="_blank">PASS Summit</a> came very close to the 3,000 mark in attendance.&nbsp; The total registration count was 2,998.&nbsp; Down from 3,600 last year, but given the economy, understandable.&nbsp; Other conferences are down 20%, 30%, 50%.&nbsp; 42% here for the first time.&nbsp; 98 SQL Server MVPs.&nbsp; Talked about real chapters and virtual chapters.&nbsp; Talked about the org itself and the re-launching of <a href="http://www.sqlpass.org/LearningCenter/SQLServerStandardMagazine.aspx" title="http://www.sqlpass.org/LearningCenter/SQLServerStandardMagazine.aspx" target="_blank">SQL Server Standard Magazine</a> as <strike>print</strike> online only (thanks for pointing out my typo Kalen!) - since it costs more to ship the hard copy than it did to create it.</p><p>168 sessions, CSS &amp; SQLCAT best practices sessions, hands-on labs, chalk talk theater, Ask the Experts, Birds of a Feather lunch.&nbsp; Session DVDs are $125, but videos will be downloadable this year. Don't eat alone - make new connections.<br></p><p><b>Bob Muglia - President, Server and Tools Business, Microsoft </b></p><p>Bob told a story about meeting Bill Gates in 1988, when he first started on the OS/2 version of SQL Server (which shipped with both 3.5" and 5.25" floppies).&nbsp; He had the original box on the stage, it was huge.&nbsp;&nbsp; He talked about the fact that advances in memory are leading to the ability to do amazing things on end users' laptops that were never before possible.&nbsp; He gave a demo of VMM 2008 R2 - using Live Migration, he migrated a SQL Server VM from one node to another, without interrupting connectivity of database users.&nbsp; Also talked about how there is I/O overhead, but Hyper-V advantages cancel it out.&nbsp; Of course you can only do so much with 4 CPUs (the Hyper-V limit), so hopefully we'll see some advances there soon.&nbsp; Cloud (SQL Azure) can be hosted privately, or at a host, or by Microsoft.&nbsp; But this does not mean the DBA is dead: our skills will transfer and still be usable in a lot of ways in the cloud. <br></p><p><b>Ted Kummert, Senior VP, Business Platforms, Microsoft</b></p><p>SQL Azure will be billing in the first quarter.&nbsp; SQL Server 2008 R2 will be released in the first half - managed self-service BI w/Office 2010, multi-server management, stream insight, master data services / master data management, scale-out data warehousing.&nbsp; Ted gave his top 5 reasons to be at PASS : </p><ol><li>still the world's largest gathering of SQL Server profesionals</li><li>you can take your questions right to the source (*lots* of dev team members on site - helps that it is in Seattle) </li><li>we've got Wayne (Synder) and Rushabh Mehta</li><li>you can work hard and play hard (Gameworks event tomorrow night)</li><li>you will build skills &amp; knowledge on the #1 database in the world <br>&nbsp;<br></li></ol>Then he talked about the four pillars of the SQL Server platform:<br><blockquote><p><b>Mission Critical Platform</b></p><p>Quality (2008 SP1 had &lt; 10% of fixes compared to 2005 SP1), secure (fewest critical vulnerabilities; not a single one identified yet in 2008) and scalable (FastTrack 2.0 from IBM, HP, Dell, Bull &amp; NEC).&nbsp; 2008 R2 - up to 256 logical CPUs, 10s to 100s of TB with low TCO.</p><p>First American Title rushed their upgrade to 2008 for online re-indexing, table partitioning and 45% space savings benefit in data compression (on 10 TB of data). Upgrade to 2008 in production was thoroughly planned and tested but the business people were not even aware an upgrade took place.</p><p><b>EmpoweredIT</b></p><p>Policy-based management, multi-server management, resource optimization, deployment simplification (Data-Tier Application Component).</p><p>Dan Jones gave a demo on creating an Access Control Point and managing multiple servers centrally using a single set of screens in Management Studio, including consolidating under-utilized instances using point-and-click.&nbsp; Focus on many of the wizards is validating first, rather than just run and come across problems after.&nbsp; Also gave a demo on Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 - deploying changes to existing DACs will be a very quick process, with no alter scripts to modify by hand.&nbsp; </p><p><b>Dynamic Development</b></p><p>Pablo Castro gave a demo of Entity Framework / .NET 4.0.&nbsp; I'm still not a big fan of this methodology (and based on the facial expressions around me, I don't think many of my colleagues are either), so I apologize for only briefly mentioning this part.&nbsp; He coined a new term, "Persistence Ignorance."&nbsp; This is the concept that you don't need to connect to a database (or even have a database yet) to unit test database-related code - this raised a lot of eyebrows but in principal makes sense.&nbsp; We have a lot of chicken and egg problems when we need to focus on code vs. schema vs. procedures and the windows of opportunity do not always occur in the right order.&nbsp; He also demonstrated PowerPivot, which gives a lot of power (perhaps too much) to Excel end users.</p><p><b>Pervasive Insight</b></p><p>Ted talked about StreamInsight, self-service Business Intelligence, and again talked about the scale-out data warehouse.&nbsp; Excel users shouldn't need to understand database terminology to consume data and learn from the information in a useful way. </p><p>Amir Netz gave a demo of Master Data Services, uploaded data to a scale-out data warehouse (336 CPUs overall), and consumed the data with self-service reporting.</p></blockquote><p><b>Summary</b></p><p>All in all a very good keynote presentation, though it did drag on a little long.&nbsp; I hope that the keynotes tomorrow and Thursday do not contain a lot of repetitive information, because if that is the case, they could have stripped this one a bit and spread the demos out over multiple days. </p>